El Conde (2023)

Voice-over narration is never something to be taken lightly in film. It is, more often than not, a crutch used to make up for poor storytelling; a way to swiftly spackle over the cracks in an ill-fitting narrative. So when El Conde begins with a long voice-over narration, one might be forgiven for becoming a touch suspicious.

As the beautiful, wide-angle, HDR black-and-white (or more compressed shades-of-grey, perhaps) scenes progress without dialog, and the narrator doesn't shut up, one might start to think: "Hey, maybe this is something unique? Maybe this narration will continue, and the film will be in a sort of long, visual storybook form?" But no, no such luck. It's just a regular movie with a whole lot of voice-over.

The narrator keeps switching roles. First she's narrating a general story as the film visualizes what she says, then she switches to narrating a description of what's on the screen, and finally she pops in and becomes an active character… though also continues narrating.

A French kid grows up and discovers he is already a vampire, which is an unusual vampire origin story. He decides to move to Chilé and wreak havoc, and some 250 years later becomes the dictator Augusto Pinochet. He calls himself The Count. He births a large family of non-vampires and refuses to vampify any fo them, but turns one of his murdery military men into a vampire servant.

He grows old, tires of life, and wishes to die. He invites all of his children to an isolated farm island where they shall bicker in the background over inheritance for the rest of the film. The kiddos never serve much purpose other than as a place for the camera to cut to between important scenes.

One of the kiddos invites an accountant to come sort out the inheritance details. The accountant is a nun, trained as an exorcist by an anti-vampire convent, who has agreed to the job with ulterior motives.

A love quadrangle forms between The Count, his wife, his servant, and the nun.

The narrator flies in for really tenuously explained reasons. She's Margaret Thatcher, and also The Count's mom, and also his lover or something. She gives an obnoxiously long and forced narrative explaining his hereto unknown history, in which she is raped by a Strigoi and gives birth to The Count, becomes Margaret Thatcher, and has Pinochet released from British prison because she loves her son. Her explanation is longer than mine, but no more fulfilling.

All of the main people vamp each other then stab each other, and that's that. Thatcher and Pinochet fly off into the sunset and the kids motor away with a boat full of old furniture.

There's a nice soundtrack of squiggly and squeaky violins.